Routing Protocols For Underwater Acoustic Networks

With the advancement in wireless communications and electronics, the underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN), a new-type network, has been the focus of research and application. The underwater wireless sensor network has limited resources, large network density and restricted communication range, where the sensor node without global ID is easy to fail. As the underwater wireless sensor network has these unique characters, the protocols of traditional wireless network are unfit to underwater wireless sensor networks.Since the hardware structure, application field of UWSN are quite different with traditional wireless network ,energy of sensor nodes is the most important factor to be considered in UWSN . In order to increase the network lifetime, energy efficiency of wireless sensor network has gotten considerable attention.In this paper, the system and structure of UWSN was investigated, and new requirements and challenges for underwater wireless sensor networks are discussed, which include limited energy of the nodes, limited communication ability, etc. And some faults of underwater wireless communication in energy consumption of wireless sensor network are also analyzed. In addition, we introduce several classical routing schemes and discuss their defects. Moreover, based on the classical DSR routing protocol, we propose a new energy efficient routing protocol (DDSR),which considered the energy distribution of sensor nodes, and is beneficial to improve the energy efficiency. Finally we develop the DDSR model with underwater channel in OPNET platform. We discuss the traditional wireless network model and DDSR routing protocols, and extend it to underwater channel. The simulation-results show that our proposed scheme could reduce the control overhead, reduce the total energy consumption of networks, and increase the network lifetime efficiently, and is better than DSR.